Making Carbon Neutrality Everyone’s Responsibility at Microsoft

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a significant step to reduce our environmental footprint by committing to achieve carbon neutrality by 2012. As the team that operates our cloud infrastructure, Global Foundation Services (GFS) will be instrumental in achieving this goal.

First, our continued effort to improve efficiency in our data center operations, using such measures as Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE), and Carbon Utilization Effectiveness (CUE), will help reduce our overall carbon footprint. Second, our detailed measurement and chargeback model allocates expense to business workloads based on energy consumption, establishing the right incentive to design for efficiency. We are proud to be taking these steps and driving accountability for reducing our environmental impact across all of our business units.